Homelab

I’m kinda both.

I have a QNAP at home that served me well for 8 years, a big QNAP (forgot model number) in my lab at work with a dozen or so 3.5”, 4x 2.5”, and expansion for pcie. I find expansion and growth difficult. Like my old QNAP can’t do 10gbe and is stuck with an Atom cpu and a few GB of ram.

It’s expensive especially compared to buying something like a 28c/256GB ram Dell R730, an HBA, and a EMC disk shelf that I now use at home for TrueNAS. For ~$600, I have up to 16 2.5” and 15 3.5” bays, 4x 10gbe, more ram than I know what to do with, and much more capability. Porting my ancient WD Red 5400rpm from my old QNAP into this NAS I’m getting ~400MBps because of the cache and its bananas.

I've built multiple DIY NASes both virtual and physical. No regrets.

I have some COTS NASes too, they do their job well. I only use them as a NAS - as in just storage. All of my COTS NASes are all secondhand, some of them are over 10 years old, still works ok, a bit slow for bit transfers but for $100 AUD for a 4 bay with 1T drives included or one of them, I'm not complaining lol

I voted DIY - No regrets. Myself (and a lot of others here) run used/surplus enterprise hardware that's cheap/free. You're kind of missing an option for that.

My primary NAS is a PowerEdge T620 with 13x 8TB HDDs (8 in the built in drive cages, 5 more in a caddy that fits in the 3x 5.25" bays). The server and the drives were free/surplus, but I bought an upgraded pair of CPUs (E5-2695 v2's) , 128GB of RAM, and the drive caddy, for probably $200 total. It's getting a little long in the tooth and I'll be keeping my eye out for something newer (and less power hungry) during the next round of decommissioning.

This scratches my 'play with enterprise hardware' itch and is easier on the wallet upfront, but the power cost is probably more in the long run.

Also, you'll likely get very different answers in the polls here vs in r/synology or similar. You're asking homelabbers here, so you're going to get homelab answers. But that's okay, because it sounds like you fit in just fine here!

I spend a lot of time myself going through this same thing. Was looking at QNAP and Synology and then potentially a DIY using Jonosbo case.

In the end I ended up going with the DIY solution, but using an old computer (i7 4790k with 32GB ram). The case has enough room for 8 hard drives. Currently only have 2 1TB hard drives running in zfs mirror. Going to be adding 3 8TB HDD in a mirror in the next few days.

I have been running Truenas Scale, and I don't regret it. So far it has been doing exactly what I need. I run about 10 VM's off my desktop/workstation. All storage for them is on the NAS which is handed off to it via NFS. And then some SMB shares for myself and the family.

I have been running Truenas for about a month now and don't have any regrets. I use it purely as a NAS. No VM's are hosted on it.

After a couple of years of DIY nas I got a Synology because I had kids and the risk of being the cause of data loss became unacceptable. So now I DIY compute (VMs, k8s) instead 😜

No regrets though, I learnt a bunch along the way and stopped before I lost anything irreplaceable (mostly)

i went diy NAS, no regrets, then went with a qnap nas to save on the power bill, also no regrets - the only thing i used either of them for is a network fileshare, though, so there's that

Over the last couple of years I've gone from a HP Microserver to a DIY Frankenbox in a Fractal Define to a Supermicro CSE-846. No regrets at all. I can now fit all the disks I could possibly want.

A NAS is *way* too easy for even a novice to build to justify buying it as an appliance. Set up a software RAID and filesystem with LVM+XFS or ZFS or bcacheFS. Install the NFS server userspace utilities. Use the in-kernel NFS server. Add a line or two of configuration to /etc/exports.

Done. That's what, fifteen minutes of work tops?

DIY all the way. I am currently running openmediavault 6 on an old G5930 CPU in a Coolermaster CM690 case with 5 x 6TB drives. It's been rock solid for a few years now. This is for storage only. I have a separate DL380 G7 currently running my self hosted stuff. Most of the storage is used for media with my critical files being backed up on 2 remote locations as well.

I've had several COTS type NAS'... all of them have had some sort of limiting factor and the value vs. hardware and capabilities were just never there for me. I went through hell with Synology and their "approved" memory and now drives... that was the final nail in the coffin for me.

Just last fall I went for broke (literally) and bought a 45 Drives Storinator AV15. Zero regrets, it runs Ubuntu and ZFS, and if it breaks I keep both pieces and can customize it all I want with any off the shelf parts I see fit. Was it cheap? Hell no... (and I'm still paying for it) .. but I was tired of messing with all these Turnkey NAS' so I decided this was the path forward.

If I had it to do over again (and wish it was an option at the time) I would have opted for their new Homelab server instead. What I have is overkill, but it was the best path forward for my needs.

Synology DS1821+. I had a go at making a hyperconverged setup with an HPE DL380p G8, loud and power hungry. Also HPE are dicks with their hardware, can't boot off the array when in passthrough mode.

Got a SuperMicro machine to try the same thing, again, loud and hungry.

The Synology is quiet and sips power. While it has no hope in hell of doing ZFS and the interface is proprietary as hell, SHR2 and BTRFS just works for me. I have a large network accessible space for "linux isos" and iSCSI for Proxmox.

I need to get rid of those 2 servers...

I voted Turnkey - No regrets.

Although I have some gripes like sometimes permissions are a bit of an arse and new user setup is a pain but other than that I'm actually quite happy with it, I only dedicate some of my 4TB to the LXC and when I need to expand I can just click a button and type some numbers and just like that I have more storage.

No survey choice to only see the results without voting? I don’t have a NAS but want to see what people voted. I guess I just vote for a random choice?

Well my day job is managing Linux systems so it was no brainer, I run other workload on the NAS too, not just file shares, and doing that on off the shelf NAS would just be a PITA.

Wow consumer ITX boards are expensive, rather limited, and look like they will suck power too.

The what now?

I picked DIY with regrets but it does not tell the full story, I guess I now need convenience for my own productivity. For me the cons outweigh the pro's of a diy system now I have spare money to invest in my lab. When I was broke it was great!

The con's are scraping a system together and spending precious hours over multiple days configuring it and then maintaining old kit, I am not a storage guy. Every configuration took a lot of time to research and then failures and restarting from scratch and then poor performance that needed investigating.

When I bought a Qnap solution, I was up and running in less than hour including adding the discs.

I went Turnkey(ish) - No regrets.

Aquired a used WD MyCloud EX4100 with no drives for relatively cheap. Slapped 4 x 4TB drives in it and haven't looked back since.

I have root ssh access to it so I can tinker a bit like installing zerotier to have access to my files wherever I am.

Having a specialized appliance for file storage is really nice and keeps things simple. I've built many storage servers over the years, and it was...refreshing to let someone else do the work for once.

DIY - no regrets

I got a free enterprise HP tower that was eol 5-6 years ago and put freenas on it. It's stil going strong. And it still beats a modern 8 bay synology.

(I've since expanded the lab, but this NAS is still with me)

I've had 2 HDDs go belly up in that time and had to replace those, but RMA was no problem since it was within 3y warranty. Due to RMA process I also bought a spare replacement , so now I have a cold spare waiting.

Power? Well... napkin math: it's ~60-70 W not counting the HDDs. I'm sure I could find something that goes to sleep (~0 W), but mine is on 24/7, and that's ok because I want my scrubs and data integrity. My more recent Truenas Scale build is more cpu, more better, more everything and sips 30-35 W idle. That one is also on 24/7. Anyway the delta between my old and less old hardware is 30-35 W at $0.10/kWh is ~$1/year/W x 35 W is about $ 35/y.

An 8 bay synology is $ 1000... yeah, I'll pay the power bill.

I also backup everything important to Onedrive (i.e. not my steam cache).

DIY, only regret was the case I used. Silverstone CS351. Just don't. Its a massive pain to work in, and getting to the lower internal two HDD bays requires tearing the whole thing apart. I picked it because it would hold everything I was using without mods. Its just a pain to work on.

My first NAS was a HP Proliant N54L that I ran Ubuntu 12.04 on. Of course, I rebuilt it several times and it ended up with Ubuntu 20.04 on it (hitting every major LTS release along the way). Ran that until just a year ago when I replaced it with a Synology RS-422+.

I went with the Synology because for the price I couldn’t really build something with hot swap drives, 1RU, and shallow depth. Now only use my Synology as a true NAS. I don’t run containers or anything else on it. Strictly an iSCSI/NFS/SMB solution to support the rest of my network.

I use both, no regrets. My DS918+ acts as a backup repository for my VMware VMs and bare metal PCs via Active Backup for Business. It's also a Time Machine repo for my Macs. I also use TrueNAS Scale on a dell T330 which acts as my media repository and shared VM storage.

The advantage of the Synology for me is its application ecosystem. Active Backup for Business is by far the cheapest way for me to back up all my VMs and bare metal Windows PCs (I have a lot, more than even the Veeam NFR license would cover.) Active Backup deduplicates my backups across the entire dataset, which is awesome. I also use the Hyper Backup to push some of my more important VM backups to Backblaze B2.

The advantage of my TrueNAS system is it cost significantly less than the Synology, was very easy to add 10Gbit fiber networking to, and has iDRAC. ZFS is also awesome. I also run a virtualized TrueNAS Scale instance, but its only purpose is to serve as a mirror for the primary TrueNAS system and the Synology.

I regret not having enough money for everything i want.

My NAS build is perfect for my need, and i think it's perfect for most of us, i'm sure there are tons of people that take my suggestion and take some hints from them.

The only real regret i have, is having just 8 GB of ram, for folder caching, 16GB would be better, but i can upgrade, so no problem.

The, of course there is possibility for improve, like ECC, IPMI, better case, bigger drives etc, but those things cost too.

If someone have the capability of troubleshooting and DIY, this remains the best solution for money and performance. Prebuilt are good mostly for company and people that don't want too many problems.

I had a QNAP. It was terrible and slow. Would not recommend. Now I have a DIY TrueNAS, would 100% recommend.

I work in IT, I did both. Started with TrueNAS but ultimately went with Synology. Main reason being, I just want my NAS to work and be simple/reliable. I dont want to have to tweak it, fix bugs with work arounds or search forums for obscure ways to fix issues.

My data is important and my time is just as important. If I didnt work in IT it might be different, but spending all day fixing and working on computer shit just to come home and continue doing it, no thanks. Same reason why mechanics always have the shittiest cars.

Synology is like the iPhone of NAS, its just works. Its more expensive, doesnt have all the bells and whistles, but what it does do, it does very well.

DIY - No Regrets.

I built my NAS out of spare parts originally and then it evolved into needing dedicated purchases. I like having full control of the OS and everything on it - it helps me understand what daemons are doing what. It does a lot more than file sharing.

The likes of QNAP and Synology may make a more polished product with an easy UI, as well as offering support, but as far as I care, I am support, so I like to fix problems myself.

If you're ping-ponging between the two options, from your post it reads like cost is the biggest problem you face. But as you say, storage is a critical part of the infrastructure and sometimes you do have to spend money on it if you want it to be reliable. I just upgraded my main NAS with a larger chassis and motherboard (from an ITX) so I can expand it further. It cost me a sizeable amount of money that might have bought me a low-end ready-made, but this is far more flexible.

DIY - No regrests is what I voted.

I started out with a Synology DS918+. Used that for a few years before getting a free Synology DS412+ from work. Used them both.

Eventually built a TrueNAS build using some used and mostly new parts. Allowed me to get a case that would hold more drives and a motherboard that wasn't picky on the parts that went in it. I have two RAID 5 arrays in there. 4x 12TB HDDs, 4x 256GB SSDs, and 1 1TB NVME. The HDDs are used for storage that aren't read from or written to often, the SSD array is for stuff that is read and written a lot, and I don't really use the NVME for anything at this time. Its just there. The reason I use the 256GB SSDs is because I get a stack of them for free from replaced computers at work. So when they die, and they have in my NAS, I just pop in a new one and rebuild the RAID.

I use the Synologys as "offline" storage and only turn them on when needed to save power.

My only regret in this setup is the case I built my TrueNAS build in isn't "easy" to do maintenance in. I need to pull the whole thing out of the rack and then do whatever I went in for. But that is something I can change by just buying a new case and not a whole new NAS. The Synology boxes are just dead simple and accessible. But, offers little upgradeability.

End note, I use my NASs as NASs, nothing else running on them. I even have the internet blocked on those devices. Want to keep the NASs setup as simple as possible so there will be less risk of me messing up and losing data.

I bought a QNAP device a decade ago. Today, it is about 3% full. Turns out I didn't need any NAS at all...

Having setup my own DIY I found that great for me, as I knew how it worked and had a lot of fun learning. When I needed an off site backup that worked out the box and was low maintenance I went with Synology

Turnkey with some serious regrets.

I just need a simple way to store my data and back it up. I went with a Synology DS1621+ and I also have a DS218j.

Things that really had me questioning my choice:

• Both of them are the noisiest enclosures I've ever encountered. Rattling all over the place and having to hack the case to stop things from rattling. It drives me crazy. I paid over a thousand dollars for a case that I need to hack to keep my sanity.
• Power consumption. The DS1621+ uses 35W at idle, even when the disks are not spun up and another 55W for 6 disks that never spin down (I've tried everything). That's 90W. The idea is that this would run 24/7 but that ends up being over $225/year. This consumes as much power as my 5950X w/ 6800XT at idle. That's insane to me.
• Fear of vendor lockup and restrictions on what I can do with the hardware. Out of the box, Synology doesn't allow NVMe volumes. I can run a script to enable it, but I really dislike the fact that they are intentionally restricting what I can do with my device.

So I'm downgrading my Ryzen machine to a low power APU and going to use it as an all flash server. Will use TrueNAS and just have my SMB shares. Only going to boot my Synology once a day for a couple hours to back up everything so I have my second copy. The one thing I like about the Synology devices is that it's super easy to schedule on/off time windows.

So annoyed that I spent all this money on the DS1621+ and it's just going to act as a backup server. Will probably look to replace the DS1621+ as a backup eventually too.

I voted turnkey no regrets.

1. i only use as a NAS / backup
2. i run 90% of my VMs, containers etc on NUCs (I run one VM on the synology for proxmox backup server)
3. i see the cost of the synology more about paying for their backup software than paying for the hardware